GAAGO: Hurling suffers when RTÉ and GAA put the best matches behind a paywall via IrishTimesSport
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According to an RTÉ source, the national broadcaster would expect to attract between 300,000 and 400,000 for a Sunday afternoon Munster championship match; in the case of last summer’s breathtaking Munster final between Clare and Limerick, the audience peaked at 695,000 and averaged out at half a million viewers. It was the only GAA game before July that came close to RTÉ’s audience for the Champions League final between Liverpool and Real Madrid.
On Sunday night Cusack made the perfectly reasonable suggestion that RTÉ and the GAA were using these games as leverage for what is a new, expanded phase in GAAGO’s existence. That, essentially, this was a commercial decision: people will be so keen to watch these matches that they will be prepared to pay for it.
As a public service broadcaster, it is RTÉ’s duty to deliver the most attractive, most popular, most newsworthy sports events to its viewers as often as it can. On the weekend just gone, RTÉ’s prime time Sunday afternoon slot for Gaelic games was devoted to a pair of provincial football finals that everybody knew were going to be one-sided and insufferably dull.
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